Sunday, November 22, 2009
Barack Obama - "bows, but the world refuses to bow back"
Apparently, American voters bought in; however, the world does not...
These are excerpts from Michael Barone's article at WashingtonExaminer.com:
"On his 10-day trip to Asia and in his 10th month in office, Barack Obama is beginning to encounter limits on his ambition to change the world. Even as he bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia last April and to the emperor of Japan last week, the world refuses to bow back.
This is not how it was supposed to be. 'I am absolutely certain that generations from now,' he said on the night he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in June 2008, 'we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last best hope on Earth.'...
...As for the planet beginning to heal, well, that's not clear. Obama evidently expected that his election would change not only America's image in the world but the policies of nations both friendly and unfriendly. In saluting the fall of the Berlin Wall, on videotape, he made no mention of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa or John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev or Vaclav Havel, but cited as a world-changing event his own election in the United States 19 years later."
